Former prime minister Goh Chok Tong (
"To make a living for ourselves is not going to be easy," said Goh, who is now senior minister in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍).
"You just look at the world map, you can't even find Singapore," the Sunday Times of Singapore quoted Goh as saying at a campaign rally. "Five hundred million people in Southeast Asia. We are 4 million, less than 1 percent of the population."
The ruling People's Action Party is expected to retain its overwhelming dominance when more than 1.2 million Singaporeans vote, but the opposition has fielded enough candidates to prevent a walkover as in some previous elections.
Critics say that curbs on expression and other strict controls hurt the opposition, though government leaders say they would welcome a serious debate.
So far, election talk has focused more on local issues than on commentary about Singapore's place in the world.
Ruling party candidates point out that they have the political leverage to upgrade neighborhoods for their constituents. Local media, which tends to support government policy, have given heavy coverage to a candidate of the opposition Workers' Party who failed to submit an election form and then gave conflicting accounts of what happened.
Goh said the top concerns for Singapore's prime minister were national security in the face of any terrorist threats and periodic instability in the region, as well as job creation and finding news ways for the economy to grow.
"Security is what keeps a prime minister awake at night. It's a 24-hour job," the newspaper quoted Goh as saying Saturday night.
In 2000, Singapore, a US ally, broke up what it said was a ring of Islamic militants who were plotting to attack Western targets in the city-state.
Singapore's output has "more or less reached the potential of the economy," said Goh, who was prime minister from 1990 to 2004.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.